A few weeks ago, I chanced upon a fascinating book called Calligraphy and Art of Writing in Jain Manuscripts , written by Dr. Shridhar Andhare and edited by Ratan Parimoo. Full of coloured plates on Jain calligraphic and painted scrolls, the book was a revelation. The photography and design by Subrata Bhowmick, a leading graphic designer, and his associate, Payal Nanavati, add value to the book.
Dipping into the exquisite scrolls presented here is like embarking on a journey in an ancient caravan that moves through time. There are numerous halts where you can pause like a latter-day Aurel Stein, the great European Indologist, and search for seals and parchments left behind by merchants of the Silk Route. Travelling down the great highway connecting the East with the West, these traders brought in globalisation centuries before we knew it as such. Arab merchants from Samarkand and Baghdad imported to India the Chinese technique of paper-making. In West India, paper became the standard material for Jain manuscripts from the 14th century onwards, replacing, and sometimes co-existing with, palm leaves.
Indic perspective
While for much of the earlier years, Jain teachers were engaged in conveying their knowledge through oral transmission, it was during a period when famines threatened to destroy whole communities that the need to record the sacred texts became urgent.
Interestingly, Andhare and Parimoo narrate the tales of Jain manuscripts from a firmly Indic perspective. Steeped as they are in the traditions of sub-continental visual arts, especially the miniature paintings of north-western India, they are able to point out interesting variations of tone, colour and, of course, subject matter.
There is a strong case for the documentation of the “manuscript
A page from the book showing a folio from a palm-leaf manuscript in Prakrit and a Sanskrit manuscript in gutka format; a painting of a traditional painter.
wealth of India” and the contribution of “the scribes” or “masters of calligraphy”. This is even more important as calligraphy is not thought to be part of the Indian manuscript tradition in the way it is for Japanese or Chinese cultures. But there are exceptions. For instance, a short paragraph translated from the Lipisaushthava, a Gujarati text of the medieval period, underlines the importance given to the perfectly formed text.
Work of art
In the period between the 8th and 12th centuries, the art of calligraphy was chiefly in the hands of the sutradhars , sthapathis and gajadars , who were instrumental to temple-building in the medieval period. Then there was a great flowering of artistic and scholastic activities in the 12th and 14th centuries, when Jains were not only
encouraged to build intricate temples and sanctuaries, but were also inspired to invest in wisdom. The book says, “The reverence for learning acted as the main inspiration in creating Shastra-Bandaras equipped with illustrated and unillustrated manuscripts.” Fascinatingly, a whole industry seems to have come into existence as a result of this need — there was a spike in the demand for pens, inks, engraving tools, paper, palm leaves and fine cotton textiles around this time.
Parimoo is astute to position Brahmi as the “mother of all scripts”, even of Devanagari, which is the one commonly used in Jain manuscripts. There is a charming story about the sage Rishabadev, who taught his daughter the script that bears her name, Brahmi. Parimoo explains why the Devanagari script flourished — it was adept at accommodating changing intonations and polyphonic variations of words from other languages.
Bhowmick and Nanavati’s perspective is a more eclectic one in the book. There are images of Ashokan edicts from the 2nd century BC on the walls of the Jain caves in Odisha’s Udayagiri and Khandagiri. The duo also focuses on the writing materials, inks and extraordinarily opulent manuscript covers, which are now a part of different museum collections.
On display here are are beautiful book covers made of long strips of wood. Although meant to protect the fragile sheaves within, they are art objects in themselves. The influence of Persian art styles in the melting pot that was 15th-century India is evident in the pomegranate designs that proliferate in the folios of the time. One manuscript margin shows a crowd of monks with begging bowls walking across a Chinese-style river matrix. Gold leaf combined with etchings in indigo and red create dramatic contrasts.
An expert on the textile wealth of the Indian subcontinent, Bhowmick is as skilled as the early masters of Jain calligraphy. With rare affinity, he has woven the collective wisdom of the Jain munis into a book that is a work of art in itself.
The book, however, leaves out the equally interesting traces of Jain scholarship in the South. There is, for instance, the Jain script notations on the rockface of the Samanar hills in Madurai and exquisite paintings in the two Jain temples of Kanchipuram, besides images of the Tirthankaras. They remain sadly undocumented.
That said, the research and rigour on display in this book can be an incentive for others to find out more about the Indian calligraphic tradition, which promises to offer rich rewards.
The Chennai-based writer is a critic and cultural commentator.
